Hello there, September . . . Would You Like a Piece of Cherry Streusel Coffee Cake?

It's been unseasonably cool here lately, and people keep saying things like, "Well, I guess summer's over." Personally, I think the days of chillier than average temperatures are simply a late summer fluke, but I must admit I'm enjoying them. It's so much nicer to bake when you don't have to hermetically seal yourself into an air conditioned house, just so your oven won't seem like a blast furnace.

So, taking advantage of the good weather, I was in my kitchen yesterday morning contentedly measuring and mixing and slicing. My intention was to make a plum-ginger upside-down cake. I made it alright, but it was an unmitigated disaster. A real mess. It was with resigned disgust that I threw it in the trash shortly after taking it out of the oven. It looked so awful I couldn't seriously have contemplated keeping it, let alone serving it to another living mammal. Here's a picture of the whole revolting mess, just as I'm tossing it out . . . pretty gross, isn't it?

I can't really fault the recipe, though. I screwed it up to start with by accidentally leaving out an important ingredient (milk), the absence of which I didn't discover--of course--until after the cake was in the oven. It had occurred to me, as I was spreading the batter over the plums, that the batter seemed unusually thick. I was pondering this when I glanced over at the window above the sink, and there on the sill I noticed my glass measuring cup containing the designated milk. Ahh, that explains why the batter's the texture of spackling paste, I thought to myself. I heaved a heavy sigh. But, since the plum cake was just something I was making for fun, I didn't sink into complete despair and I figured, perhaps, it could be salvaged. Then, to add insult to injury, I foolishly took the cake out of the oven way too early. The visible part of it looked completely baked to me, but I had nagging doubts. Now, I've been around the block enough times to know that until a cake like this is flipped over and the pan is lifted off, one never really knows exactly what an upside-downer is going to look like. I knew the danger, and yet I ignored my instincts. The unveiling isn't supposed to be a shocking event, in any case. It's not supposed to be like unmasking the phantom of the opera. And yet that's exactly what it was like. (Ooooo . . . I shudder at the memory of its abject hideousness.)

Good riddance to bad plum cake. Moving on . . .

To exorcise the specter of the nasty plum-ginger upside-down cake, I then decided to make an uncomplicated coffee cake and vowed to follow the instructions with military precision. This I did, and as a result we have today's recipe. It's a Martha Stewart recipe, from her Baking Handbook. I squelched my perennial desire to tweak it. Well . . . okay. . . almost squelched it . . . I admit I tweaked the streusel, and maybe I tweaked the amount of sour cream in the cake's batter, but all to good effect I swear! And, of course, I rewrote the directions (naturally).

Anyway, it's a fine coffee cake. I'd recommend it. Nice texture, not heavy. Nice flavor, not too sweet. You can eat it with a fork or hold it in your hand. The streusel topping has a lovely buttery flavor, and it's a pretty cake too. Neither hideous nor revolting. It doesn't even remind one of unsightly phantoms.


Cherry Streusel Coffee Cake

(For a printable version of this recipe, click here!)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9" tube pan, or a springform pan with the tube insert (butter it well).

For the streusel:

1 cup and 2 Tbsp. All Purpose flour
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
3/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. kosher salt
3/4 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

In a medium bowl, combine the dry ingredients with a fork. Add in the butter, and blend it in with a pastry blender. The streusel should have some little chunks here and there; no need to blend it too much. Put the bowl aside, in the fridge, until you're ready to use it.

For the cake:

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 cups All Purpose flour (I used bleached)
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup and 2 Tbsp. sour cream
1 cup frozen sour cherries that have been thawed and well drained (important that they're well drained and not too wet)

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder and soda, and salt. Set aside.

In a large mixer bowl, with the paddle attachment, beat the butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla until light and fluffy--about three minutes. Add in the flour mixture in three parts, alternating with the sour cream in two parts; begin and end with the flour mixture. Beat until just combined, and stop to scrape the bowl and the paddle as needed.

Spread about half the batter in the buttered pan. Place the cherries evenly on top of the batter, being careful not to let any of them get close to the sides or center of the pan. (They all need to be completely covered by batter.)

Carefully spread the remaining batter over that and smooth the top. Sprinkle the streusel topping evenly over that.

Bake for approximately 35 to 40 minutes. When the top is golden, and it springs back slightly when gently pressed, the cake is done. (I also did the toothpick test. I was gun shy after that plum cake incident!) Let the cake cool on a rack for about 15 minutes. Invert the cake onto a dish or flat baking sheet, then immediately reinvert it back onto a rack to finish cooling. Glaze the cake when it's fully cooled, if you prefer. Or leave it plain. Delicious either way!

For glaze:
1 cup confectioner's sugar
2 Tbsp. milk or half & half

After the cake is completely cooled, mix sugar and milk together until completely smooth. Drizzle on the cake. (If you prefer, you can flavor the glaze with just a couple drops of vanilla or almond extract. Remember, though, brown vanilla will make the glaze look beige instead of bright white.)



(If you'd like to leave a comment about this post, or to read any existing comments, just click on the purple COMMENTS below!)

The Queen of Hearts Overbaked those Tarts . . .

I took the plunge this week and made a fruit tart. I'm more of a cake/cookie baker than a pie/tart baker so it wasn't as if I was betting on a sure thing when I decided to do this. Granted, it was a pretty tart, all in all, but far from perfect. I didn't expect perfection, though, and maybe you shouldn't either, especially if you've never made one before.

The first problem I encountered involved the crust. Despite my anxious hovering, the outer edge obviously overbrowned, thanks at least in part to my recalcitrant oven. I can hardly wait for that old tin can to keel over so I can start combing the stores for a beautiful new convection oven. You know, one of those polished-nickel-finish professional-looking jobs that every food magazine is touting these days? It's only a matter of time, or so I keep telling myself. (We're going on fifteen years with the current oven. Can it really be that much longer??)

Forgive me, I digress.

Back to the tart. I had no trouble at all making the tart dough itself. Against my better judgment I used one of Martha Stewart's recipes; she and I are not always sympatico, if you know what I mean. There's a bit of a rift in the trust department, as far as her recipe reliability goes. I've been let down, and more than once. But yesterday, turning the other cheek, I gave the old gal another chance at bat and used the basic tart dough recipe from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook. I wasn't wholly disappointed this time. In fact, the dough came together very smoothly and rolled out with no glitches whatsoever. It was an extremely cooperative dough, with an unexpectedly pleasing buttery color. (Leave it to M.S. to take the color palette of the unbaked dough into account when concocting the formula. She probably used paint swatches to get it just right.)

Using a French rolling pin, I rolled the dough out between two pieces of parchment on my cold marble pastry slab. (The slab had been in the freezer for about 20 minutes.) That worked like a charm and kept the dough from getting too soft. The paper peeled off cleanly and the dough settled comfortably into a nine- inch tart pan. After a little tucking, and the requisite docking with a fork, it resembled a cozy blanket, what with that pretty scalloped edge. And the warm golden glow it gave off had me mesmerized . . .

So I put the unbaked tart shell in the fridge to chill a bit before baking. Once cold enough, I laid a piece of parchment over the dough and filled it with dried beans to act as "pie weights" and keep the shell from puffing up in the oven since it would be blind baked. Put it in the oven.
















It soon became clear the outer edge of the crust was well on its way to browning, long before the rest of the dough could reciprocate. After about ten minutes of baking, I covered the edge with a larger sized, overturned tart-pan ring.

That helped, I'm sure, but ultimately the whole thing just got too toasty. The shell was usable, and use it I did, but it was certainly not as picturesque as I'd hoped it might be. I set the shell aside to cool.

Same breezy process with the pastry cream. (I used the recipe from the King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion cookbook; the King's never really let me down.) It blended together just as the recipe described, with no problems. The recipe didn't even mandate straining the pastry cream, and yet it ended up quite smooth. I put the hot pastry cream into a glass bowl, covered the surface of the cream with plastic wrap to prevent a skin from forming, and it went into the fridge to chill.






































At this juncture I started preparing the fruit. Shooting for a vivid tart, I used blackberries,
strawberries, and kiwis. I actually did a test run of the fruit placement on the inside of the tart pan ring, to see what arrangement would look best and to make sure I had enough pieces/slices of each fruit. (I thought I was leaving nothing to chance . . . how poignant.) After I sliced the kiwis, being obsessive, I rounded them with a cookie cutter to eliminate the uneven edges left from the knife. The stage was just about set.

It's amazing how little pastry cream you need to fill a shallow tart shell. After seeing the amount of pastry cream the recipe yielded--perhaps one and a half cups--I was afraid there might not be enough, but the opposite was true. After I'd poured and smoothed the cream in the shell there was actually some leftover. Fruit placement, the next step, was relatively stress free.

Now, as you probably know, the final touch on a tart like this is typically a glaze, both to add that beautiful sparkly quality and, in some cases, to help stave off deliquescence. (For the unitiated among us, deliquescence refers to something becoming soft, fluid, melty. Not a good thing when used in reference to a tart.) There are as many recipes for tarts as there are for pies, cakes, cookies, and every baking expert seems to have their own opinion on the best type of glaze to use on fruit.

There are those who advise using heated, strained preserves, typically either apricot, currant, or strawberry. There are those who advise using strained jam mixed with a liqueur like kirsch. There are those, Martha Stewart among them, who advise using a homemade sugar syrup comprised of granulated sugar, water, and lemon juice, boiled and left to simmer for a while. The latter is what I used. As I gently brushed the crystal clear syrup onto the fruit, its impressive shimmer warmed my heart. (Yes, yes, I used one of those new floppy silicone-bristled brushes, have no fear. No stiff old bristle brush for me. I didn't just fall off the turnip truck, you know.)

At this point, one could say I rested easy. Grabbing the camera, I photographed the tart for a few minutes and felt pleased with its overall appearance, despite the darkened crust. I put the tart, in a covered glass cake dome, into the fridge as it wouldn't be sliced for hours.

Perhaps three hours later I looked at the tart again, the way a new mother admiringly peeks in on her sleeping newborn. Sigh. . . Said newborn was looking alarmingly watery on top. Crestfallen, I delicately dabbed up the watery liquid with the corner of a paper towel, being careful not to mess up the cream. Long story short, the tart kept deliquescing throughout the evening. That sparkly glowing aspect, which in my hubris I had so coveted, was now sadly diminished . . . along with my dreams of a tarty triumph.
Postlude: The tart was sliced and eaten about six hours after it was glazed, and it certainly wasn't bad. But, next time, I'm holding off on the glazing until perhaps half an hour before serving. And, I'm going with the strained jam method instead of sugar syrup. I suppose I should have known there was a reason Ms. Stewart mandated the glazed tart should be served "immediately." But I find it disagreeable to admit she was probably right. Most disagreeable.


(To comment on this post, or to read any existing comments, please click on the word "COMMENTS" just below.)